The Dharma Bum

"The sensual man conforms thoughts to things, the poet conforms things to thoughts" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

If memory serves me correctly, and usually it cards me first, one of the things I was supposed to write about was technology. So, with my train of thought temporarily on track, let me fulfill that little requisite. You'd think that in this inundated age of electronica with "e-everysinglething.com" and virtual "everything else" that it might take some shining anomaly of technology to stop and make one smell the cyber-coffee. Not so true believers! For those of us so easily amused, the paradigms of the marvel of technology are the little things we take for granted. So sit back and let me tell you a story, a story of a 3-way...calling that is.

Last weekend, in the midst of another 48 hour simulacrum of doing absolutely nothing of any importance, I decided to call my friend Wesley. Amidst our banter, he informed me that our friend Emilie had called and wanted Crystal (our friend and Wesley's roommate) and I to both call her later. While I was contriving my pseudo-Machiavellian plan for Wesley to keep Crystal busy while I called Emilie and won (won what? Absolutely nothing - that's the whole point), he puts Crystal on the phone who after a minute puts me on hold. Thinking Crystal to be the ever inspiring model of conviviality, imagine my surprise when the phone starts ringing and Emilie answers. After a brief random chaos theory in action conversation ensues, Crystal departs, hangs up, and Emilie and I are left on the phone to pontificate what just happened. What utterly amazed us was that I hadn't called her, she hadn't called me, and yet here we were on the phone together, discussing the merits of this pinnacle of science.

While this may seem a bit trite or insignificant to some, others will feel my awe - you know who you are. If you thought technology peaked with frozen pizza or being able to record one channel and watch another, then this is for you. If you can remember the joys of being able to buy a cassette tape (cas`sette/tape) from the music store, and either having to saw, chew or burn your way through the foot long thermal plastic "who cares about the environment" case to get to that precious tape - which you usually thought sucked two weeks later and you ended up selling it at your family's next garage sale - this column is for you. And finally, if you can remember, and religiously quote, lines from any movies such as 'The Breakfast Club', 'Sixteen Candles', 'Reality Bites', or - in the name of our father, George Lucas, the Holy Trilogy - and not remember the last thing you learned in math class, then these lazy grey Saturday words are written for you. Why you may ask? Because, even though it's after noon, you've either just gotten up, just got done with the cartoon network, or are still in bed calculating how much longer you can avoid doing absolutely anything. Isn't life beautiful?

Technology is simply a very funny, perhaps dangerous thing. Perhaps Marx should amend his saying and add that it is "the opiate of the masses". Yet we cannot deny it, or our almost inability to live without it. Personally

I work with computers every day - designing websites and various other techno refinements. Honestly, if the Internet, or heaven forbid, e-mail disappeared, I'd get over it rather quickly. Yet to play devil's advocate, certain technologies seem to have an intrinsic causal importance to us, such as medical advances, etc. But at what price do we trade technology for humanity? In an age where pop culture seems to be the politics, in an age where people are inherently alienated and solipsism can be replaced by a keyboard and a modem, in an age where the cartoon network has turned into the news, have we not traded a part of ourselves for it? Have we acquiesced into the 21st century symbiotically dependent on people like Uncle Bill and his bag of goodies?

I wish I had an answer but it escapes me. So I sit here, in front of my computer, writing on my yellow tablet with my old Zebra pen, in an effort to get these thoughts out of my head and into yours. I think of people like my father, the strongest and brightest star I have in my life, who is a pillar of insight and could care less about the Internet, or streaming-RealTime-Shockwave Enhanced-Java filled-A.S.P.-Dynamically Style Sheeted websites. As a lad growing up he did just fine without computers because he was too busy living his life and trying simply to survive another day. My mother, whose worked with computers for as long as I can remember, would trade it all to be in the middle of nowhere, on one of her Arabian horses with the wind in her hair, and the plains as her office. (Love you, mom and dad).

Perhaps the lesson is to be learned in balance. I'm not condemning or vilifying technology, I'd just like to see humanity resume their autonomy without it a little more. Do not go gentle into that good night of cyberspace and electronic worlds. Embrace it with one arm, with the other - all things that make life worth living. Write a real letter to a loved one, take a friend out and spend hours talking about nothing over coffee, find a real person that sends your heart reeling and your mind spinning and make something happen with them. Go outside about ten minutes before it rains and just go for a walk. Read your favourite book again, or watch your favourite movie for the 20th time. Drive somewhere and just get lost.....just remember while you're doing all of this to come back and visit the OFF! website.

Well, now that I've turned diametric opposites several times and probably given you an ambiguous and acerbic view of what I've written about technology, I think I shall take my leave of you. Join me next time, same bat time, same bat channel for another skinny dip in the stream of consciousness that is my mind. So as the sun sets in the west, I bid you a fond farewell, from the land of 3-way calling, while I watch the Breakfast Club for the millionth time, quoting every line from Judd Nelson. Bye kids.